Descend- Seeing Stars
Page 35
Still, it was the best plan he had. So, Jay simultaneously began to feed PSI into Higen’s core while also feeding life force and healing power into the tissue of his body. The core began to spin as it filled with more PSI. Jay worked to expand the channels that provided the energy a path to flow.
He advanced the body along more and kept pushing. He didn’t want to fuse with Higen. The ultimate threat to them all would be for the AI to infect him. But he kept pushing the power. At the same time, he called out, “Higen, daddy is here. I’ve come for you. Talk to me, my son.”
“YOUR SON IS GONE.”
Jay ignored it but noticed that the attacks against him were lessening. He started to feel a resonance with his PSI. His son was stirring. He recognized his father, but it wasn’t enough.
Jay smiled. His memories of childhood came through. He knew his son had always enjoyed it when he visited, but he never held a candle compared to Meikiyo. Truthfully the same could be said for all his children. And why not. It might change as they aged and grew, but Higen’s mind was still that of an infant only a few weeks old.
He was not that far removed from the safety of the womb. His father was fun, his mother was safe. She was love personified. She fed him from her own body, a body which had held and nourished him. She was the one who needed to get through to Higen.
Jay, a boy who had lost his mother knew this truth better than any other. He didn’t short sell his importance because he also knew the harm of a poor father. But he remembered that no one could replace a boy’s mother. So, Jay needed to be a conduit between the two.
He split his attention even further and sent out tendrils of power to Meikiyo. He whispered telepathically to join with him as they called out to Higen. He promised to broadcast her words to him.
Jay covered her channels with his and created a circuit between them. Immediately his power swelled but this had never been about power. That was what Coreframe had failed to understand. It wasn’t about power, and it wasn’t about intellect.
Those were not the things that made humanity great. It was not his mind or even his PSI that had empowered Jay. It was his relationships. His connections with the women that he was fused with. Humanity was more together than it was as random individuals.
Then the bond snapped into place. Jay had never attempted something like this before but now he had done it. He had forged an emotional bond between mother and son, and he piggybacked on it.
She felt her son’s fear and wept but in the same instant reassured him. His immature mind felt her touch and knew that he was safe. He was always safe with mother. There was a surge of PSI in his body and Jay directed it, splitting his attention yet again and he forced that energy to scour the neural pathways.
Neurons died, but there were still plenty. Jay chased down Coreframe, trapping him in a tiny corner of his son’s mind. The AI had been shedding and more of itself, desperate to keep at least its base. Everything else could be rebuilt from that.
When finally, it was down to an irreducible core, that point at which nothing more could be shed and the AI remained intact, Jay knew he had it trapped. He then did the unthinkable and he disintegrated a tiny hole into Higen’s skull. He then removed the offending portion of his son’s brain. It was a horrible trauma to Jay to do this. He worried that he would cut away the wrong part, but he worried more that he wouldn’t get all of this cancer.
With patience as the minutes turned into hours, Jay slowly, carefully kept at it. He maintained the link between mother and son who basked in each other’s presence. He channeled strength into his son to carry him through his ordeal, and he focused on cutting away this blight upon his son.
Exhaustion settled in as he maintained such precise focus for such a long time. His body was capable, but he was only human. Still, he searched his way across a trillion neurons moving faster than any human should have been capable of but then again, they were hardly mere humans any longer.
At some point in the process, he felt Amelia, Trina, and Eesa enter the room they were in. He drew comfort from their presence but didn’t dare risk splitting his attention any further. After nearly a day though the task was complete. Coreframe was gone from Higen and Jay had already started to return his son to his original form.
It would take many more weeks of body modification, but Jay was confident that he would be able to give his son back the normal childhood that he wanted for all of his children. Now that the A’snkarnt, Forlorn, and perhaps the worst, Coreframe were all gone. Jay dared to believe that humanity had a future, and his children could live their dreams.
It had all begun with a dream for him, why not let it end with a better one.
Epilogue- New Beginnings
Jay woke up in his vastly oversized bed. Well, it wasn’t really his bed, but the bed of the wife he had stayed with last night. Each of the wives and fuses that wanted to were allowed to found their own city. Each city would control a portion of the globe and would be ruled by that wife.
At first some of them hadn’t liked the idea, but once they realized that a lifetime of thousands of years or more lay before them, they began to shed some of their impatience. Besides, visiting with each other was as simple as a quick teleportation, which they did quite often. Still, each of them was raising children, and taming the land around them. Since it had been fifteen years since the Forlorn had fallen, many of their early children were already adults and marrying their cousins to create new families. It felt as jumbled as the family lines in the Greek pantheon, but they were making it work.
Before waking, Jay had been having pleasant dreams, but these were filled with visions of his children and even grandchildren playing in the new forests that they were seeding across the surface of New Earth. The name might be lame, but the place most certainly was not, and it provided them with a reminder of where they came from.
Fifteen years had passed since they settled onto New Earth. Jay periodically checked on the other human settlements spread throughout the universe, but most of them were far enough away that he didn’t bother checking in more than once a year. Many of them were even hostile to him.
Not outrightly hostile to him, because, well, they wanted to keep living. That didn’t mean they weren’t hostile. The list of grievances against him were as varied as those with the complaints. Even after fifteen years many of the sleepers were having trouble adjusting. Part of Jay couldn’t blame them. After all they had woken to find that everyone and everything they knew was gone, including their planet.
Of course, so had he and his team, but they had to fight through all the hell to make a safe world for the sleepers to wake up in. So that distinctly lessened his sympathy.
Beyond complaints of things not being the way they wanted them to be, the biggest issue he heard about was why couldn’t Jay turn the rest of them into “god-like” figures. Most of the time, Jay tried to give them a diplomatic answer, but a few times it came down to an amazingly simple, “Because, I don’t trust you.”
He also had to visit the Tamoori home world every couple of months. Eesa missed being around her people despite having brought a couple dozen of their people to New Earth. Sure, she had integrated remarkably well into their family and growing society. But she was still different. She knew it and they knew it.
Jay dreaded what might happen at some point in the future when a distinction might be drawn between his half-Tamoori children and his purely evolved human children. It was a problem for another day though. Today had enough to keep him occupied.
Today, children should be allowed to be children. And why not. Yes, they had some special abilities, but they didn’t have implants or stimulants to push there bodies to further evolutions. They had what they had, and Jay thought that was for the best.
Jay pushed those concerns out of his mind though. He and his wives had worked tirelessly making safe worlds for each of the other human colonies. They had striven to make sure that the people on each world would be on an equal footing. They
had even put the other worlds before their own. Now, those worlds would rise or fall on their own merit.
His thoughts were brought back into the moment as he felt a hand subtly sneak under the sheet and down between his legs. He smiled, even after the threats were gone and evolved humanity stood atop the food chain in the known universe, he was still wanted. He was loved and he loved in return. Could there be any better feeling in the world?
Jay knew he needed to go out and help with reshaping the planet’s topography. There was a mountain that needed to be shifted to create a better tropical zone. But the only mountains he was interested in now were pressed against his skin sending shivers down his spine.
Having a harem was better than he ever imagined, and it was good to be the king. He was no lecher, he was just a man in love, many times over.
THANKS FOR READING DESCEND- SEEING STARS
This wraps up the adventures of Jay and his harem, although there is a story in my mind that I’d like to tell about their universe in the distant future. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we get to visit them once again.
If you liked my writing and want more books like these, please leave a nice review here!
Other books by David Burke-
War God for Hire- Gladiator (March 2021)
War God for Hire- Adventurer (May 2021)
War God for Hire- Mercenary (July 2021)
War God for Hire- Conqueror (September 2021)
Prism Academy – TBD
Other books by Sean Oswald (David Burke is a pen name this is my real name and what I write family friendly litrpg under)
Life In Exile Series-
Watcher’s Test (April 2020)
Watcher’s Question (July 2020)
Watcher’s Fate (October 2020)
Watcher’s Question (January 2021)
Watcher’s Growth (October 2021)
Watcher’s Expansion (December 2021)
Change Series- Books 1-3 expected second half 2021
Ten Gates - TBD
Recording on the first audiobook of Descend will release on March 23rd. All five books will be made into audiobooks by Podium. They will be narrated by the awesome duet of Daniel Wisniewski and Rebecca Good
While there is certainly no obligation if you want to support me and get access to early chapters I release unedited work as it gets written on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=39529448
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Burke is a mild-mannered something who tries to enjoy each day a bit more than the last. It dawned upon him at some point that life was racing him by and he wasn’t nearly as young as he used to be.
So now he spends his nights and lunch hours and any other free time he can putting down on paper all the stories that have collected over a lifetime.